If you haven’t heard of Photosynth before, then you’ve probably been living under a rock. But the next time you’re under that rock, take a picture, and share it with the world.

For those do remember, Photosynth is a project by Microsoft Live Labs, a research team under the Windows Live brand who are experimenting with new ways to visualize data.

Today, the team has released the public technology preview so the whole world can see what the fuss has all been about. Although the preview is only limited to several predefined ‘spaces’, and you cannot add your own photographic resources to the project, but that doesn’t make this any less interesting than it already was.

The thing that surprised me the most is the use of a web browser environment. I never thought the browser had so much power to be capable of processing such tasks, but the Live Labs team has made it possible. And this opens up a whole new range of opportunities for Microsoft and online photo services like Flickr. Flickr’s implementation of geotagging would be made complete redundant if a technology such as this were to be implemented. Everything is automated and perfect.

Without further ado, let me show you what Photosynth is about. Or you could try it for yourself. Please note, the images were not pre-cached, so everything’s pretty much live. Notice how fast it loads the pictures, and I’m 10000km away!

everything looks beautiful except for the fact that this is an activeX control which, besides the fact it is thus limited to windows (but i read they are working on that), can only be installed while running under administrative privileges – preventing the application to load in your usual holiday-internet-café-venue.
but taken aside the accessability it looks nice!

Oh. My. God! It’s feels like I’ve just entered the Matrix or something! I love this thing. It’s beautiful, intuitive, and a joy to use! Well done Microsoft Labs, and please, don’t ditch this, bring it out to the masses in all it’s glory!

For automatic geotagging you need a datalog GPS receiver in additon to your digital camera. The GPS receiver data and the digital camera data is then automatically linked together by the locr software. All information will be written into the EXIF header.

Use the “Show in Google Earth” button to view your photos in Google Earth.

With locr you can upload photos with GPS information in them without any further settings. In the standard view, locr shows the photo itself, plus the place it was taken. If you want to know more about the place where the photo was taken, just have at look at the Wikipedia articles which are also automatically assigned to the picture.